Discover the magic of winter in Banff on the Day of Adventure! Skiing or snowboarding, ice trekking or ice climbing, and snowshoeing are a few of the ways you can experience the allure of Banff, Lake Louise, and the Rocky Mountains covered in snow. Free registration required for delegates. View Day of Adventure activities.

Reception from 5-6 p.m. followed by Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour Preview

Join us for the opening reception to kick off AdventureELEVATE 2018 (pick up your badge and check in), followed by a “sneak peak” into a World Tour Screening – featuring a sample selection of short films from the 2017/2018 Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour which now brings the best in mountain and adventure films on the road in 40 countries worldwide.

Reception and film screening hosted by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

If you did not check in last night, come to the first floor of the Kinnear Centre to pick up your badge. All delegates must wear badges throughout ELEVATE to gain access to sessions and events.

Start AdventureELEVATE by stretching your legs, enjoying some fresh morning mountain air and getting to know the extraordinarily diverse Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity with a walking tour provided by local legend and whitewater guide, Jim Olver. Space on tour limited to 12 participants. Sign up here. 

Bringing the theme of AdventureELEVATE 2018, Empower Your Edge, to life, this presentation willshow you how to define and cultivate the strength found at your own personal edge. Delivered by an executive with proven leadership success as the CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, and the CEO of Pepsi Middle East and Canada, and now chairman of UK’s Beattie Group and Canada’s Beattie Tartan Integrated Communications team, Kevin Roberts will share an inspiring approach to leadership, offering stories from his own companies that illustrate how all businesses can deliver peak performance through leadership, whereby every person at an organization is a leader driven by purpose.

Use this time to meet other AdventureELEVATE delegates through spontaneous or pre-scheduled meetings with appointments made on the event app.

In this dynamic and highly interactive session, you’ll get an overview of the trends that are disrupting and shaping the adventure travel market landscape today. We’ll cover a number of key themes, including going back to nature, high tech high touch, extreme sustainability, mindful adventures, status adventures, disruptors in our backyard, and millennial behavior spillover. We’ll bring some of today’s themes to life with examples of cutting-edge innovations that are driving a wave of creativity and change in our sector. After the presentation, you and your fellow delegates will participate in an interactive dreaming task to generate ideas for innovations for your own businesses, destinations, and the adventure travel industry as a whole.

Popular at Adventure Travel World Summits, MediaConnect gives you the opportunity to connect with official media delegates — an impressive group of travel journalists, editors, and influencers. In this two-hour session, seize the opportunity to meet one-on-one with specific media delegates and pitch stories or campaign ideas related to your adventure travel business. Be sure to do your homework before attending; preparation and research are key to your success at MediaConnect.

HOW IT WORKS:

The MediaConnect session is open to all delegates. There are no pre-scheduled appointments at MediaConnect. If you know who you want to meet with, you can go find their specific table (designated by a sign with their name) and wait to meet with them and deliver your pitch. There will be a timer on to keep conversations to six minutes, and you may be waiting in line to meet with some delegates.

Look for detailed profiles of official media delegates in this platform, and find more tips on pitching media in the following articles from AdventureTravelNews:

What Adventure Travel Businesses Need to Know About Working With Influencers by Casey Hanisko
How to Pitch and Work with Writers by JoAnna Haugen
7 Pitch-Perfect Tips from a Media Pro by Norie Quintos
A Guide to Working with Online Influencers by Jackie Nourse

Join Destination Canada and Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada’s Dene Sinclair as she showcases how Canada’s adventure travel industry is expanding from coast to coast to coast thanks to a growing Indigenous tourism industry.

Adventure tour operators, destinations and media interested in learning more about the market opportunity represented by African American travelers will learn from experienced leaders in this session. Explore the latest market statistics from travel professionals who are successfully catering to this audience; gain insight into how current adventure product and marketing can be adapted to appeal to this market; and in a workshop setting, explore ideas and strategies with other delegates.

Over the past few years, new marketing automation platforms have greatly enhanced our digital marketing capabilities. Core features include:

• Tracking website behavior, including frequency and depth of visits, conversion actions taken, and even real time presence
• Digital behavior scoring based on email and website interactions
• Personalization of marketing content in both email and web
• Lead nurturing via personalized and automated email drip campaigns

In this session — intended for adventure travel businesses that already have an email marketing program in place — you’ll hear about the experiences of leading tour operators and marketing agencies with marketing automation platforms. And you’ll get practical advice on how to leverage the capability of marketing automation tools for your business. You’ll learn how to score certain behaviors travelers exhibit in their interactions with company emails and websites. Then we’ll dig into how to use these scores to notify your sales team about hot leads or place prospects into drip email campaigns, where marketing automation can help your company speak to people at different stages of the research and buying process. We’ll also talk about challenges, successes, failures, and lessons learned before breaking into groups to practice building marketing automation campaigns.

A large percentage of adventure travel takes place in rural areas, but not all rural communities are reaping the benefits of this growing industry. As members of the adventure travel community, we can do something about this. Whether you are a business owner, tour guide, destination development or marketing professional, government official or protected lands authority, conservationist, or indigenous leader — you can work to make sure that adventure travel provides economic and social benefits to rural communities. Through collaboration with others in your area, you can amplify these benefits to reach the entire community. To help you do that, this workshop will share methods for rural tourism development, address potential pitfalls, and include small group activities. Be ready for a lively discussion on how to engage and empower community members on the edge to support and participate in seizing a destination’s inherent adventure potential.

Visit the Walter Phillips Gallery to immerse yourself world-class contemporary art housed on the campus of the Banff Centre for Art & Creativity. This week, Like ships in the night, a solo exhibition by Montreal-based, Algonquin artist Caroline Monnet is on display. Monnet is the recipient of the 2017 Walter Phillips Gallery Indigenous Commission Award, created to support the commission of new work. Admission is free of charge. Open hours are Wednesday – Sunday 12:30 – 5:00 PM.

ATTA’s original D.N.A. Happy Hour is a new take on making business contacts. Tour operators, travel media, destination professionals, travel advisors, and industry partners — we’re all looking to build business relationships with like-minded people. Come prepared to share what is unique about your business – concisely – and you’ll share this in meaningful, fun conversations with drinks and prizes provided by event partners. 

It is a 10 minute drive from the Banff Centre to the Fairmont Banff Springs. Transfers will be available starting promptly at 4:30pm.

Tonight is yours to explore the city of Banff.

Tour operators, media, destinations and industry professionals working in all capacities within adventure travel will have the opportunity to connect with fellow delegates during the inaugural AdventureExchange, a series of pre-scheduled, one-on-one meetings debuting at this year’s AdventureELEVATE.

The AdventureExchange brings together the best parts of ATTA’s popular Marketplace and MediaExchange events. It is dedicated meeting time for all delegates — creative partnerships come from creative thinkers and needn’t fit a predefined formula: listen to a new product idea, share common challenges and solutions with colleagues, find a unique take on your company’s story and share it with the attending media — the opportunities are only limited by the extent of our imaginations. Learn how it works.

Adventure industry practitioners balance a complex set of needs every time they write an article, design a trip, develop a marketing campaign or plan a destination development strategy. Conservation needs, cultural considerations, business management, technology trends and a healthy dose of humanity – all are factors that must be taken into account in order to deliver the ultimate customer experience that keeps businesses growing.  

This all-hands-on-deck workshop blends research, analysis, psychology, and management consulting with a hearty dose of audience participation, exploring what customer experience means for your business, how to craft it, and how to keep it vibrant.

Use this time to meet other AdventureELEVATE delegates through spontaneous or pre-scheduled meetings with appointments made on the event app.

National Geographic, with its longstanding history of fabulous photography, well understands how the right image can be a conversation starter, a challenge, a plea, a catalyst, or a call to action. Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Anne Farrar is the Director of Photography at National Geographic Traveler and has built a career around storytelling through images. In our closing presentation for AdventureELEVATE 2018, Anne shares how, in a world cluttered with travel photography, she is able to keep this iconic media brand living up to its audience’s expectations by continually accessing the power and creativity found when wandering into the unknown.

Join Travel Alberta, Banff and Lake Louise Tourism and tourism partners from around the province for a celebration of Adventure that you won’t want to miss. ‘Alberta Night’ will feature signature Alberta cuisine, live entertainment, immersive experiences, and culture as we cap off AdventureELEVATE in true Alberta style. As we celebrate the success of the event in a one of a kind venue in Banff set around a roaring fire with views of the night sky, you will find out why Alberta is famous for its Western Canadian hospitality. Bring a coat, transportation will be provided to and from The Banff Centre. See you there! 

Snow Day

While AdventureELEVATE is officially over, join us on Friday, March 16th for an adventurous day in Banff & Lake Louise.

Start off with a day on the slopes at one of Banff’s world class ski resorts. For only $99 CDN you’ll get a lift ticket, gear rental, bus transfers and a $15 lunch voucher.

SkiBig3 Lift Ticket – One Day Pass

• Access to exclusive discounts on Après Ski Food & Beverage, Spa & Activities throughout Banff & Lake Louise – See www.skibig3.com/perks 
• Ski/Snowboard rental voucher will be included for redemption at The Lake Louise Ski Resort. Rentals include Mid Performance Skis, Boots & Poles or Snowboard & Boots
• AdventureELEVATE Snow Day Lunch: This will be held in the Powder Keg & Kuma Yama located on the top floor in the Lodge of Ten Peaks at the Ski Resort’s base. $15.00 Food & Beverage voucher included – please bring this with you.

Book $99 Ski Package Now